“It was 5:00 AM. My sister cooked me a delicious breakfast. Then I jumped in the car and made for the Syrian-Turkish border.”

Lawand Deek, a 21-year-old from Ar-Raqqah province, is keeping a diary of his exodus from Syria. The number of pages is growing.

As a child, Lawand had hoped to go to Canada to study, but after his visa application was turned down, he resigned himself to enrolling as a student in Damascus, where he learned English. After the civil war erupted, he had to flee Ar-Raqqah because of violent clashes in the area.

It did not take him long to get out of the country. He knew he did not want to end up in one of the refugee camps near the border, and instead headed northwest…